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Month: August 2012

Let’s get this straight. The Government CANNOT CREATE JOBS. The government does not create anything, it just takes from some citizens to give to other citizens. Government can only create the CONDITIONS for the private sector to create jobs. That means low business taxes, reasonable regulations, and certainty about what is planned. People want to know why so many big businesses are sitting on huge piles of cash these days. Well, they have no idea about what onerous regulations or tax increases are coming down the pike.
I predict that if Mitt Romney is elected in November, those Central Planners in DC will lose a lot of their power, and business will start taking risks and hiring again, which will improve the standard of living for all Americans.

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After 25 years of society encouraging use of “gender neutral” terms like mail carrier (for mailman) and fisher (for fisherman), I officially resign from feminist English. After 12 years of being “Business Survey Chair” of ISM-Western Washington (supply management professionals), I have decided that I am decidedly NOT a chair, and I’m adopting the title of Chairman. I am the concertmaster of the Music Hall Players orchestra. It’s perfectly acceptable to call the group encompassing all of our species “mankind”. So let’s take back the language that the feminists have reduced to mush.

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Here’s an interesting bit of information I just discovered about public education, at least in the state of Washington where I live. Do you know who/what determines the length of the school year in public schools? Well, I saw that in Washington, the length of the school year (days of instruction) depends on what is in the TEACHERS UNION CONTRACT. No mention of the pupils’ need for any number of instruction days to learn what they need to learn. The school year is supposedly 180 days, but in recent years, that has been eaten into by training days, teacher conference days, snow days etc….
I think we just might have our priorities wrong. No wonder the percentage of students who complete a full 12 years of education has dropped steadily since the late 1960’s. Teachers care more about their own paychecks, pensions, and perks than whether their students learn enough to be informed citizens. What a pity for our country.

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The stock market consists of the combined actions of millions of individual and institutional investors, all over the world. These range from big mutual fund companies buying and selling stocks for their “actively managed” funds to individual investors sitting in front of their computers placing trades once in a while, to “day traders” who move in and out of stock with lightning speed. Since 2000, I’ve been a moderately-active individual investor, buying and selling mutual fund shares in my IRA’s and individual stocks in a little Roth. Lately, I have been noticing large stock-market moves based, according to the financial media (I like SmartMoney and 24/7WallStreet), on “hopes” that the European Central Bank or the US Federal Reserve will do something supposedly stabilizing to the global financial situation. So, that means that many players are betting on the “big government” of the financial world. It seems to me that what they are doing cannot materially improve the world’s finances, since they rely on methods already proven to not work, or be counterproductive (“quantitative easing”). Hope that some government entity will do something is a pretty thin reason for buying or selling any debt or equity instrument. For myself, I prefer to go with the prospects of whatever companies and funds I invest in, rather than vague hopes.
Lately, I’ve been a pretty good stock and fund picker. Even in the depths of the Great Recession, I continued to contribute to my 401(k) at work, and all my investment accounts show positive returns,